How to install plugins without using a third-party host?

[NateDhaliwal]

(Btw @Heliosurge I think this was brought up earlier):

@merefield

@Willy

. I’m not kidding when I say they’re very small. For example, one of them just adds a button to an external page on the home page, and that’s it.

If you can boil that down to a Theme Component you could go Heath Robinson and use discourse_theme to push from your local machine to your server, but don’t cry if your local machine dies, is lost or stolen and you can’t get your code back (without then working out how to get a live copy from your server)

@awesomerobot

Even simpler if you don’t want to install the discourse_theme gem, themes can be uploaded as a zip file and you could build quite a lot in the admin UI directly.

[Willy]

It’s obvious that the topic has now completely veered off course, as always happens in any thread that goes against the grain. I don’t even intend to discuss the issue of using a theme component, but thanks to everyone anyway.

[merefield (Robert)]

How did it veer off track? You asked a question and people expressed their opinions. Looks completely on topic to me?

You have all the info you need now to implement whatever setup you want?

[chapoi]

@merefield

How did it veer off track?

I agree somewhat with OP that the “opinions” started to slide into “ridicule OP for what he wants”.

I don’t think this needs to be debated further. So unless someone has another solution to contribute to this topic, we can end the discussion here imo.

[Heliosurge (Dan DeMontmorency)]

I do agree that some of the posts have unneeded aggressiveness.

I only mentioned a TC in regards to your adding a button to the home page. This has already been demonstrated by several components. If it is not a security issue a TC is the way to go.

Though I myself would be interested in what issues you have with Themes & Theme components? Plugins are more for security and things that cannot be accomplished within a TC - like changing how core functions. If your more comfortable we could discuss this in a friendly pm.

Another benefit of the TC is you could edit your code when needed within site web UI.

The problem I see with plugin route is that even official plugins merged in core still use Git to update the plugins & discourse itself.

[Falco]

@Willy

Is there even a way to do that?

You can use the volume support on the app.yml to mount a folder on the host to the plugins folder on the container.

[pfaffman (Jay Pfaffman)]

You can use any way you want to copy your source code from wherever you keep it into the discourse/plugins directory. If you don’t like git clone you can use rsync or cp -a. Just copy your plugin to your VM any way you want and insert some command to copy it the way that git clone would.

[Ed_S]

@pfaffman

You can use any way you want to copy your source code from wherever you keep it into the discourse/plugins directory

This surely is the right answer here. It respects the original parameters of the question. This hasn’t been a great thread from the perspective of showing a positive and supportive community.